“Oh, come on, son,” Beau was supposed to have told that sergeant after punching out the deputy and chewing on the ear of some innocent fool who’d made the mistake of trying to help. “You an’t gonna find better soldier material anywhere in the county. Hell, you can see we already know how to fight!”
Telling the story, Aunt Ruth snarled and twanged like Uncle Beau did when he’d been drinking, sounding so like him that I giggled to hear her.
“Bet they didn’t really want to be in no army,” I told her. “Bet they went down there on a dare or something.”
“Well, they an’t the type to play soldier,” she agreed, “but they’d love the chance to shoot strangers, drive trucks, and work on engines. No different really from what they do now, except for the uniform. They love that story, though, never seem to pay no mind to the fact that the army didn’t want no trash that has spent so much time in jail and hasn’t even finished high school.”
“They’re drunks,” I said, and Aunt Ruth just nodded.
“Kind of. No different from Travis, I suppose. But you know, they don’t think about it. It’s like going to jail. They think that a working man just naturally turns up in jail now and then, just like they believe they got a right to stay drunk from sunset on Friday to dawn on Monday morning. Beau himself swears that he was fine until he started drinking on weekdays.” She shook her head, pushing her thin hair back with one trembling hand.
“You can’t tell them nothing.”
“Beau got his taste for beer as a boy,” Aunt Ruth told us one Saturday morning. She was sitting out on her porch while I scraped at the railing and Earle cleaned the gunk out of the works of the old wringer washer she’d decided to sell.
“He used to go off with Raylene to that roadhouse over at the Greer city limits after she quit school and he’d just turned thirteen. They earned a little money by sweeping up and cleaning and stocking the coolers full of beer and Coca-Cola. They’d always take themselves a few bottles as a bonus. Never hurt Raylene none, but she didn’t have the taste. Liked cola better, matter of fact, and only took beer to sell back to Beau. Boy liked bottle beer better than mother’s milk, and that’s most of what he’s always drunk, no matter what that wife of his swears. Beer can rot you out too, destroy your liver and turn your brains to bleached oatmeal. It’s a fact. He didn’t need that white liquor they sell over at the franchise.”
“Oh, hell!” Earle slapped his palm against the oily metal of the wringer. He never liked to hear anything bad said about his brother Beau. He didn’t even like to hear people repeat things he said himself. “Beau’s got worse stuff than beer in his life. Beer’s nothing. Keeps you regular, beer and pinto beans. If Beau was to stop drinking his beer, he’d probably swell up and explode.” His restless black eyes dared Aunt Ruth to contradict him.
“That wife of his, that Maggie, is the trouble in Beau’s life. Little white-faced thing, white eyes, white-headed, bruises soon as the wind blows hard. Woman makes babies the way you make biscuits. All the time pregnant with some little whey-faced empty-eyed child of God. Hellfire, Beau couldn’t get ahead of himself if he gave up everything but black coffee and hard work. Seven children! Bad enough Alma’s got so many, but at least she knows how to keep hers fed and clean. That little Maggie can’t even change a diaper without coming on a dizzy spell. Woman has eaten Beau alive. Like some vampire sucking the juice out of him. You cut that girl open and you’d find Beau’s blood pumping her heart.”
“Magdaline’s not the reason Beau’s gonna bleed himself to death,” Aunt Ruth snorted. “She don’t make him drink that poison.”
“Don’t she?” Earle slammed the wringer down on the rags he’d spread out to spare the porch boards. “Tell the truth, Ruth. Don’t you think she’s got even a little to do with Beau keeping himself blind drunk all the time?”
Aunt Ruth pulled herself around to look Earle right in the face. “You making out like you think that’s what’s wrong with your life, Earle Boatwright? Your woman eat the heart out of you? The mother of your daughters drive you to drink and day jobs and cursing on my porch in the broad daylight?”
I hugged my knees up close and watched Earle’s face. He was always arguing with Aunt Ruth, but it rarely got so mean. I bit my lips and saw him hang his head. When Earle looked up, his face was red and his eyes all shiny.
“Yes, Ruth,” he whispered. “The bitch of it is, I do.”
Aunt Ruth harrumphed out her nose and then pulled herself out of her rocking chair to stalk over and grab him around the neck. “I’m sorry, baby.” She looked a little wet-eyed herself. “That was a low thing for me to say. I know. I know how you miss your girls. Know how you ache for what is gone. Don’t think I don’t hurt for you, baby. Don’t think I don’t know how you hurt.”
“Oh, Ruth!” Earle tried to jerk away, but Aunt Ruth was holding him too tight. I bit down harder, tasting metallic blood in my mouth, feeling my eyes swell up with hot tears, but almost choking on a crazy need to laugh. Aunt Ruth looked so funny, all spindly and frail hanging on to her big tall red-faced brother so hard she was nearly choking him. But he had always been her baby, like Beau and Alma and Raylene and Mama. Ruth had half-raised them and still acted more like their mother than Granny ever did. I watched Aunt Ruth’s bluish fingers clutch at Earle’s arms while he tried to keep his greasy black hands off her yellow chenille robe.
“Oh, Ruth,” he groaned and gave it up. He hugged her back, picking her up in his arms. “Don’t cry on me. We’ll both be sick if you get to crying all over me.” He stumbled across the porch and went down on one knee to put her back in her rocker. “It an’t fair. I an’t never been able to argue with a woman when she starts crying.”
I hung on to the porch railing, watching the two of them hug each other tight. I couldn’t imagine hugging Reese like that, telling her how I really felt, crying with her. It made me jealous, made me wish I was part of that embrace, that generation, as quick to yell and curse as to cry and make up. Daddy Glen said I was a cold-hearted bitch, and maybe I was. Maybe I was.
The morning Mama drove up in Beau’s truck, I was on the porch with four little earthenware pots and Aunt Ruth’s big bucket of wandering Jew. She’d had the idea the day before that she’d like to hang those pots just under the eaves of the porch, and swore that I could leave half the plant in the bucket and break up the rest of the red-and-blue-green tangle into the little pots.
“What you think, sister?” Aunt Ruth called to Mama. “An’t they gonna look fine up there under the eaves? Stuffs so sturdy it might even grow up over the roof.”
“Might,” Mama agreed, coming up to give me a fast hug. “Grows quick enough anyway.”
“People say it’s a weed but I’ve always liked it, specially since it don’t take any effort to keep it going.” Aunt Ruth patted the seat of the cane-back chair beside her rocker. “Come sit with me. An’t seen you in weeks.” She leaned forward to look directly into Mama’s face as she sat down. “You look different, almost rested. What you been doing, napping a lot?”
Mama laughed and shook her head. “Just sleeping better since it cooled off a little.” She pointed at the pile of wet moss and clay I was mixing with black dirt. “Everything looks fresher now that the heat’s broke. I’d swear, Bone, you’ve grown a full inch this month.”
I just grinned and went on gently separating the tightly meshed roots of the old plant. Aunt Ruth had said some of it would die back but if I could avoid bruising the fine hairs on the roots, most of it would live. So I had to go slow as I unraveled the long, pale shoots.
“Oh, Bone’s gonna be a tall thing.” Aunt Ruth took a sip of tea and shook the glass. “You want something to drink, Anney? Bone made me up a fresh pitcher this morning, got lots of sugar and lemon in it.”
“Lord, yes. It might have cooled down a bit, but it’s still hot enough.” I jumped up, slapping my hands against my jeans to loosen the dirt. “But don’t put too much ice in it,” she called.
She d
idn’t have to say that. I knew how Mama liked her ice tea. I took a lemon and cut six paper-thin slices from the middle, dropped them in a glass, and squeezed the rest of the juice over them. Three cubes of ice on that, then I poured the sweet tea up to the rim of the glass. I sipped it as I carried it to the porch. I heard them before I stepped through the door.
“You think it’s gonna last?” Aunt Ruth’s voice was soft, Mama’s reply even softer.
“I sure hope. You know what his daddy’s like, but Glen’s like a new man since he started this job. He’s sure this shows how much his daddy cares about him, hiring him on and giving him his own route. Doesn’t even seem to matter that he’s getting less money than the other routemen, says that’s just to prove he an’t getting no special treatment.”
“Sounds special to me, sounds nasty. The whole bunch of them make my bones hurt.”
“Oh, Ruth. I don’t know.”
I put my head against the screen and waited.
“Glen’s had so much trouble, been through so many jobs. An’t many people would take him on at all at this point, and God knows, he’s trying so hard. He’s out of the house at dawn, don’t get home till after sundown, goes in on weekends to do maintenance on his truck. He wants to do good, he wants to prove himself. He acts like a different man.”
“Well.” Aunt Ruth sounded less sure of herself than Mama did. “He ask about Bone?” There was a pause. I put my teeth on the rim of Mama’s glass.
“He an’t mentioned her once since she came over here.” Mama’s voice had dropped even more. Now it was a whisper.
“He’s good as gold with Reese. But it’s like he don’t even remember Bone, like she was run off or dead, somebody we’re not supposed to mention at all. I tell you, Ruth, I don’t know what to do some days.”
“Doesn’t sound like you have a lot of choice, honey.” Aunt Ruth’s voice was kind but firm. “You knew when you went back what the problem was. I can’t say whether he’s a good or a bad man. I know you love him, like I know I don’t much care for him myself ...”
“Ruth ...”
“No, listen to me. I an’t gonna tell you to leave him. He’s your husband, and it’s clear he thinks the sun rises and sets in your smile. I an’t sure whether he’s crazy jealous of Bone like Granny thinks, or if it’s something else. But he an’t never gonna be easy with her, and she an’t never gonna be safe with him.”
“He does love her. I know he does.” Mama’s whisper was fierce.
“Maybe. Still, I look at Glen and I can see he an’t never been loved like he needed to be. But the boy’s deeper and darker than I can figure out. It’s you I worry about. I know the kind of love you got in you. I know how you feel about Glen. You’d give your life to save him, and maybe that’ll make it come out right, and maybe it won’t. That’s for God to fix. Not me.”
“Ruth, think about what you said about him. Anybody can see how Glen got bent, what his daddy’s done to him. I an’t never seen a boy wanted his daddy’s love so much and had so little of it. All Glen really needs is to know himself loved, to get out from under his daddy’s meanness.”
My teeth ached with the cold from the ice in Mama’s glass. I knew I should push through the door, let them know I could hear them, but I stood unmoving, listening to Mama.
“You never saw him when he used to come down and wait for me to get off work at the diner. That was when I started to love him, when I saw him look at Bone and Reese with his face so open I could see right into his soul. You could see the kind of man he wanted to be so plain. It was like looking at a little boy, a desperate hurt little boy. That’s when I knew I loved him.”
“Oh, Anney.”
I pushed the door open with my foot and stepped through. Their heads turned to me, Mama leaning forward on her chair close to Ruth’s bent neck, Ruth looking paler and more worn than when I had gone into the kitchen.
“Took you long enough.” Aunt Ruth’s glance was too intent.
“I sliced the lemon the way Mama likes. You can see right through those slices.” My face felt frozen. I gave Mama her glass and went back to the overturned bucket and the broken mass of roots. I tore one half free and dumped it back in the bucket and then just as roughly started breaking out four equal sections of roots and top growth. As I worked I kept my face down, my eyes on the plant.
“I was telling your aunt Ruth that Daddy Glen’s started a new job over at the Sunshine Dairy. He’s real pleased about going to work for his daddy, and it looks like this job is going to work out pretty good.”
“That’s good.” I shook dried dirt free from one clump of roots and then set the mass down in the damp mix in the earthenware pot. “You want me to use that braided cord to hang these up, Aunt Ruth?”
“Yeah, the brown cord Travis brought home from the dime store. It should hold up pretty good.”
I nodded without looking at her.
“You get that done, Bone, and we can talk about when you’re gonna come home. Reese’s been missing you pretty bad.”
“I thought I was gonna stay till school started again.” I kept my voice neutral, my head still down. “Aunt Ruth can’t possibly get along without me. She needs me.”
There was a long silence, and then Aunt Ruth cleared her throat. “Bone’s right, Anney. I don’t know how I’d drag my sorry butt out of bed without Bone to wake me up. She gets up in the morning singing along to the radio. Sounds just like Kitty Wells sometimes.” She might have been starting to laugh, but coughed instead.
I looked up then, carefully, trying to keep my face in the shade. Mama was leaning forward into the sun, her fingers laced together on her knees, her eyes squinted against the light but intent on me. Aunt Ruth was leaning back in her rocker, her hand up, almost covering her mouth. Mama pulled her fingers free and dropped her hands down so that her palms cupped her knees.
“Well, I can see how you might not be able to stand the loss of that. But maybe I’ll just bring Reese out on Saturday. Wouldn’t want her to forget what her big sister looks like.”
I spooned loose dirt into the little pot, sprinkled water on the dusty leaves. The cutting drooped already, getting ready to lose half its growth. But the stem was moist and flexible under my fingers. Strong. It would come back strong.
In August the revival tent went up about half a mile from Aunt Ruth’s house on the other side of White Horse Road. Some evenings while Travis and Ruth sat and talked quietly, I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter. He’d rave and threaten, and it didn’t seem he was ever going to get to the invocation. I sat in the dark, trying not to think about anything, especially not about Daddy Glen or Mama or how much of an exile I was beginning to feel. I kept thinking I saw my uncle Earle in the men who stood near the highway sharing a bottle in a paper sack, black-headed men with blasted, rough-hewn faces. Was it hatred or sorrow that made them look like that, their necks so stiff and their eyes so cold?
Did I look like that?
Would I look like that when I grew up?
I remembered Aunt Alma putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.”
At least I wasn’t as ugly as Cousin Mary-May, I had told Reese, and been immediately ashamed. Mary-May was the most famous ugly woman in Greenville County, with a wide, flat face, a bent nose, tiny eyes, almost no hair, and just three teeth left in her mouth. Still, she was good-natured and always volunteered to be the witch in the Salvation Army’s Halloween Horror House. Her face hadn’t made her soul ugly. If I kept worrying about not being a beauty, I’d probably ruin myself. Mama was always saying people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity. With all the hatefulness I was trying to hide, it was a wonder I wasn’t uglier than a toad in mud season.
The singing started. I leaned forward on the balls of my feet and hugged my knees, humming. Revivals are funny. People get pretty enthu
siastic, but they sometimes forget just which hymn it is they’re singing. I grinned at the sound of mumbled unintelligible song, watching the men near the road punch each other lightly and curse in a friendly fashion.
You bastard.
You son of a bitch.
The preacher said something I didn’t understand. There was a moment of silence, and then a pure tenor voice rose up into the night sky. The spit soured in my mouth. They had a real singer in there, a real gospel choir.
Swing low, sweet chariot ... coming for to carry me home ... swing low, sweet chariot ... coming for to carry me home.
The night seemed to wrap all around me like a blanket. My insides felt as if they had melted, and I could taste the wind in my mouth. The sweet gospel music poured through me in a piercing young boy’s voice, and made all my nastiness, all my jealousy and hatred, swell in my heart. I remembered Aunt Ruth’s fingers fluttering birdlike in front of her face, Uncle Earle’s flushed cheeks and lank black hair as they’d cried together on the porch, Mama’s pinched, worried face and Daddy Glen’s cold, angry eyes. The world was too big for me, the music too strong. I knew, I knew I was the most disgusting person on earth. I didn’t deserve to live another day. I started hiccuping and crying.
“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.”
How could I live with myself? How could God stand me? Was this why Jesus wouldn’t speak to my heart? The music washed over me.... Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. The music was a river trying to wash me clean. I sobbed and dug my heels into the dirt, drunk on grief and that pure, pure voice soaring above the choir. Aunt Alma swore all gospel singers were drunks, but right then it didn’t matter to me. If it was whiskey backstage or tongue-kissing in the dressing room, whatever it took to make that juice was necessary, was fine. I wiped my eyes and swore out loud. Get that boy another bottle, I wanted to yell. Find that girl a hardheaded husband. But goddam, keep them singing that music. Lord, make me drunk on that music.